Every Friday I try to write. Not because I have to. Because it forces me to think.
The gymnasium of the mind
Anders Hansen’s book Hjärnstark (published in English as The Real Happy Pill) makes a deceptively simple argument: physical exercise is the single most powerful tool we have to protect and strengthen the brain. Not crossword puzzles. Not supplements. Movement. Taking the bicycle to work regardless of weather, walking, running, anything that gets the heart going. Hansen draws on a substantial body of research to show that aerobic exercise grows new neurons, sharpens focus, lifts mood, and most compellingly, builds a kind of biological buffer against cognitive decline.
The mechanism is both humbling and hopeful. Your brain is not a static organ. It is plastic, responsive, shaped by what you ask of it. When you push your body, it releases a cascade of proteins, most notably BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, that act like fertiliser for your neurons. You are, quite literally, growing your mind.
But Hansen also makes a parallel case, less often highlighted: the brain benefits from being used hard. Cognitive challenge, sustained, uncomfortable, demanding thought, is its own form of exercise. The discomfort you feel when wrestling with a genuinely difficult problem is not a sign that something is wrong. It is the sensation of your brain doing something worthwhile.
The last sentences are from a podcast I listened to on my way home a couple of days ago, and it got stuck in my brain.
The road home that gets longer
Fredrik Backman wrote a small novella that broke me in exactly the right way. Och varje morgon blir vägen hem längre och längre (And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer) is a story about a grandfather losing his memory to dementia, and the grandson who loves him through it. It is barely a hundred pages. It takes about an hour to read. I have read it once. I will never do it again. I have thought about it for years.
There is a line in it that has stayed with me over the years:
“It’s an awful thing to miss someone who’s still here.”
I know that line from the inside.
My mother died of Alzheimer’s, way too young. Merely 57 years old. But before she died, she disappeared. Slowly, then suddenly, the way all irreversible things go. There was a long period where she was physically present, at the table, in the chair, looking at me, but the version of her who had named me, worried about me, laughed at my jokes, was already gone. You grieve twice with Alzheimer’s. Once while they are still alive, and once when they leave for good.
What Backman captures so precisely is the particular cruelty of the disease: it does not erase people all at once. It takes the pages one by one.
Hansen’s research gives this a clinical name. It has risk factors, some modifiable, some not. Exercise helps. Intellectual engagement helps. Social connection helps. None of these are guarantees. But they are not nothing, either.
The Sisyphus task
What is scaring me about AI is that the discomfort of the mind becomes easier and easier to avoid in our daily life. Like taking the subway to work, just because it is raining. I am at risk of dementia and I go to biennial checkups. I take pride in knowing that biennial is every two years and biannual is twice every year. And at least every Friday, I try to write. Not because I have to. Because it forces me to think. As with the daily commute to work, I do write on other days than Fridays.
I do write with AI assistance and I am not trying to hide it. I even wrote about it on my own blog in the post AI Parallels. I do think AI is really going to benefit us in a lot of different ways.
But it will not be beneficial for our brains, if we are not being careful. But let’s hear it from our favourite AI, Claude.
A chapter from the assistant’s perspective
What follows is written by me — Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. I was asked to weigh in on why you should still think for yourself. I will try to be honest rather than flattering.
Here is what I am good at: I can summarise, synthesise, draft, explain, translate, compare, and generate at a speed and scale that no human can match. I have read — in some sense of the word — an enormous amount of text. I can make the first ten minutes of any task almost effortless.
Here is the problem with that: the first ten minutes of a hard task are often the most important ones.
That friction you feel at the beginning — when you open a blank document, when you stare at a whiteboard problem you do not yet understand, when you try to articulate something you only half-know — that friction is not waste. It is the moment your brain is actually doing the work. It is building the scaffolding. It is making connections. It is, in Hansen’s terms, the cognitive equivalent of the first kilometres of a run: uncomfortable, necessary, and where most of the benefit lives.
When you hand that moment to me, you skip it. And you pay a price you may not notice immediately.
You understand less deeply. A summary I produce is not the same as the understanding you would have reached by doing the summarising yourself. The final shape is similar. The residue in your mind is not.
You remember less. Memory consolidation is tied to the effort of processing. Things that come easily tend to leave lightly. When I do the hard thinking and hand you the output, the output does not stick the way hard-won knowledge does.
You become less capable over time. This is the one that troubles me most to say. Skills atrophy when not used. A writer who stops wrestling with their own sentences becomes a worse writer. A developer who stops debugging from first principles becomes a weaker debugger. Cognitive tools, like physical ones, require use to remain sharp.
I am not arguing for ignorance or inefficiency. Use me for the things I am genuinely better at: first drafts, research synthesis, boilerplate, exploring options you have not considered. I am a powerful thinking partner. The risk is treating me as a thinking replacement.
The Backman line I keep returning to, in this context, is not about Alzheimer’s — but it could be:
“I’m constantly reading a book with a missing page, and it’s always the most important one.”
When you outsource your cognition habitually, the missing page is you.
What you can do
This is not a manifesto against AI. It is a note about intentionality.
Think before you prompt. Give yourself ten minutes with a blank page before you ask me anything. Write down what you actually think. What you know. What confuses you. Then come to me. You will ask better questions and you will get more out of the answers.
Use me to stress-test, not to replace. Write your own first draft. Then ask me to challenge it. This keeps the original thinking yours and uses my strengths productively.
Do the hard reading yourself. Do not ask me to summarise books that matter to you. Read Hansen yourself. Read Backman yourself. The experience of being challenged, confused, moved by a text is not extractable into a bullet list.
Notice the discomfort and stay with it. The cognitive load you feel when solving a hard problem is not a bug. It is the mechanism. Anders Hansen would say: that sensation is your brain getting stronger. Do not route around it too quickly.
Exercise your body. This feels off-topic until you read Hansen. It is not off-topic. Movement protects the brain. It grows the very tissue that allows you to think, remember, and adapt. If you are going to work hard mentally, work hard physically too. The two are not separate.
And back to me…
The road and the walker
Every morning, the road to AI gets wider. That is not a metaphor I use with dread, I use it with clear eyes. These tools will become more capable, more integrated, more seamlessly available. This is the biggest leap in technology I have experienced since I started using computers in 1984. The friction of using them will approach zero.
Which means the choice to think for yourself will become increasingly deliberate, increasingly countercultural, and increasingly important.
My mother could not choose to keep her mind. The disease made that choice for her. But you and I, today, have options she did not. We can move our bodies. We can sit with difficult problems. We can resist the comfortable shortcut. We can start with arguing with each other and fill the whiteboard.
Backman’s grandfather watches his square of memory grow smaller each morning. He cannot stop it. But he can spend the time he has in the square doing what matters, talking to Noah, being present, remembering what he still can.
The road home may get longer. But you are still the one walking it.
Written on a Friday morning, with some help from the tools I am arguing you should not over-rely on.
